Mindfulness Training

I offer mindfulness consultation, training, and coaching to adult individuals, couples, and groups. My expertise is in helping people to find creative ways to bring their mindfulness practice with them into their daily lives. I have been doing this work with psychotherapy clients for years and believe that this service is helpful to people whether or not they are in therapy.

Meditation is one of the most effective ways to generate a state of mindfulness with consistency, but mindfulness training does not have to involve formal meditation. I have had my own meditation practice for almost two decades and have been teaching clients how to meditate for well over a decade. Mindfulness meditation can be taught in a secular or a spiritual way. I can do either or both, depending on your interest and belief system.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness meditation is the practice of sustained concentration on a particular object, usually your subjective experience of breathing, to cultivate mindfulness. To be mindful is to be more conscious, awake, and informed about oneself. Choosing to sit in meditation is choosing to practice self-care and compassion as well as to be courageous.

Mindfulness meditation is a practice that cultivates mindfulness and compassion. In the process, it reveals to you the inner workings of your mind, heart, and body. Mindfulness meditation builds awareness and increases your capacity for insight, hence it is known as an insight or awareness form of meditation.

Mindfulness meditation is an ancient practice linked to Buddhism, but you do not have to become a Buddhist or subscribe to the Buddhist belief system in order to adopt mindfulness meditation as a practice in your life. The Dalai Lama himself refers to Buddhism as “a science of the mind”. Mindfulness meditation can be a spiritual practice or instead a practice that benefits you.

Bring Mindfulness Into Your Every Day Life

Your mindfulness practice is for you. It should be useful and sustainable for you. My aim is to help you to learn about, experience, and benefit from being more mindful in your every day life. Together we discover how to make that happen as effectively and efficiently as possible

I enjoy teaching mindfulness meditation to beginners as well as working with more experienced meditators seeking support, coaching, or consultation related to their mindfulness practices. Difficult things sometimes arise in one’s sitting practice. I can help you to make sense of and address them.

Being able to take what you learn from your sitting practice and apply it to your every day life is what makes having a mindfulness meditation practice valuable. I’m interested in and skilled at helping people who have meditation practices take their mindfulness practices “off the cushion”.

Benefits of Mindfulness Practices

The short-term and long-term benefits of mindfulness meditation are gaining more attention from modern-day neuroscientists than ever before. The latest research confirms much of what has been known first-hand by experienced meditation practitioners for centuries: Regular meditation practice brings inner calm, stillness, and peace to our lives. Meditation preventively reduces stress, anxiety, depression, anger, and overall reactivity and teaches us new coping skills. Physical pain and chronic illness are better managed with a regular meditation practice. Meditation also has been known to improve sleep, mood, energy level. Overall meditation increases one’s quality of life and benefits our relationships.

Mindfulness practices target the autonomic nervous system, and more specifically, the parasympathetic nervous system, your body’s “rest-and digest” system. When your body perceives it’s in a safe environment and with sustained attention on pleasant things, the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, allowing the body to settle and find ease. In a state of greater ease, our minds, hearts, and bodies expand.—They really do!

Mindfulness practices carve out new neural pathways in our brain that repeated over time lead to new and usually more effective habits. Learning to access a pleasant parasympathetic state with sustained attention leads to greater capacity for awareness and insight. It’s a more open state that allows us to take in more data, to think about things in a more comprehensive way, to connect with ourselves more deeply, to open our hearts more with others, and to be more creative.

Living a fast-paced, busy, or stressed life leads to increased sympathetic nervous system activity. The sympathetic nervous system is the body’s “fight-or-flight” system. The sympathetic state gets us charged up and contracts our minds and muscles. Our minds become narrowly focused on staying alive while our muscles contract so that we can move out of harm’s way. Given how much opportunity there is in our lives for our sympathetic nervous systems to become activated, it is important to engage in activities like mindfulness practices that regularly shift us back out of this state and give our bodies some time to settle and unwind. In a more settled state, our bodies are capable of healing.

To set up a consultation to discuss your mindfulness practice or to start a mindfulness practice, please contact me and feel free to read testimonials from clients who have experienced this training first hand.